The career and enthusiasm of the journalist and editor John Whale, who has died of a brain tumour aged 76, was centred on the English language - its dramatic expression, its glories and nuances, its protection from ignorant and sloppy usage. Reading English, writing English, editing what had been written in English and, for a time, performing English plays were the driving forces in his life.

He put these interests to practical effect as a political reporter and Washington correspondent with ITN, a long-time writer with the Sunday Times, as head of religious programmes at the BBC and latterly as editor of the Anglican weekly, the Church Times. He wrote books on the media and the church, and was, briefly, a professional actor.

John's background and upbringing pointed the way. The son of a nonconformist minister, theologian and headmaster, the Rev John Seldon Whale (with whom he shared a birthday), he was taught early that good books were essential to the enhancement of life. The fact that he was born in Oxford and brought up in Cambridge served to highlight that teaching. At Winchester college (1944-49), where I first met him, he made a sharp impression; he was literate, in command of the language, almost sophisticated. He also showed clear signs of his fascination with drama. At school, he was an outstanding Lear, and when he left he had a walk-on part in the West End, was a callboy in Oklahoma! and understudied in a play by William Douglas Home.

He did his national service (1950-51) in the Intelligence Corps, rising to lieutenant, and read classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, graduating in 1955. Then the theatre took hold again. He worked as an actor and stage manager in Coventry, Farnham, Dublin and Nairobi, learning the ways of rep. He wrote plays, some produced on BBC radio, novels and stories. He seemed to have found a settled path.

But it didn't quite work. In 1957, he married Judith Hackett, a fellow former Oxford student and actor. They went to Paris, taught English and became translators and interpreters, John working in the English section of French radio for a year. Then, in 1960, he got a job as a scriptwriter and general reporter with ITN. The path was now clear, and to those of us who knew him well, it seemed strange that he had come to journalism so comparatively late.

John spent nine years with ITN; three as a general reporter (1960-63), four as political correspondent (1963-67) and two as US correspondent in Washington (1967-69). His political interests were already evident by his becoming a Labour councillor in Barnes, south-west London; they were sharpened by covering Harold Wilson's general election victories in 1964 and 1966, when John got a famous scoop interview with the Labour prime minister travelling back to London from Liverpool on the train after the polls had closed. In America, he covered the 1968 presidential election and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King; he also wrote his first book about television and politics, The Half-Shut Eye (1969).

Back in England, he then began 15 years of contentment and great productivity at the Sunday Times (1969-84). As a leader writer, he was forthright in expression and punctilious in style; he also took a close interest in Northern Ireland, a province still largely ignored by the British media, and after internment was introduced in August 1971 turned up early stories about the hooding and isolation of IRA suspects. Having edited a book about Pope John Paul II in 1980, he suggested the idea of a religious affairs correspondent - and promptly got the job.

He also became, in effect, the Sunday Times arbiter of style. Every Saturday night, Judy and John sat in the office in Gray's Inn Road poring over every word of the paper's content: even the sports pages were subjected to their rigorous scrutiny of syntax and punctuation. Lest they err again, John introduced the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors to the paper, with a special supplement written by him for his fellow journalists. His 1984 book, Put It in Writing, based on a series in the Sunday Times magazine, underlined the message that the English language reigned supreme.

In 1984 we brought John in as head of religious programmes at the BBC, with a staff of 50 and a lot of quite expensive programmes. For a while, he found it strange and troubling - he wanted to make staff changes and found that difficult; his drive towards professional perfection trod on toes. Yet I am sure those years were of invaluable experience when, in 1989, he took his final job as editor of the Church Times. His other books included Journalism and Government (1972) and The Politics of the Media (1977), and he contributed to Why I Am Still an Anglican (1986). He also served as churchwarden at St Mary's church, Barnes (1976-81). Judy and their son, Toby, survive him.

Rupert Shortt writes: John Whale came to the Church Times intent on remodelling it. His main achievements in five years as editor were to entrench its reputation as a serious journal of record, and cultivate standards of literacy rarely matched elsewhere.

The homely tone with which readers had been familiar was almost completely erased in favour of a neutral style of writing, reflecting John's belief that the paper should cover church affairs with strict detachment. This benchmark was applied to features, as well as news, and - apart from occasional effusions of piety at Christmas or Easter - even his editorials were restricted in the main to rehearsals of both sides of an argument.

Some readers saw these changes as marking a final betrayal of the paper's Anglo-Catholic roots; others judged that the disinfected air marked a loss of the common touch. But there were important merits in John's approach. The paper had, in fact, been moving towards non-partisanship on a number of subjects under his recent predecessors, and over the central question facing the church during his editorship - the priesting of women - the readership was itself deeply divided. A sceptic where theological certainty was concerned, John felt that the paper could best serve its readers by providing an open platform for debate, and this aim was discharged with fairness and tact.

His stance on this issue also reflected sensitivity towards his staff (most of whom did not share his liberal-Protestant churchmanship), and though some who did not know him properly were inclined to mistake his patrician manner for stiffness, he was a highly bene-volent colleague. It was perhaps at the personal level - and in the good sense and humanity of his writings on political subjects - that his otherwise private faith was most clearly reflected.

He enjoyed an active retirement, writing a stream of excellent reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, among other publications, until his final illness.

· John Hilary Whale, editor and journalist, born December 19 1931; died June 17 2008